Last July, in the hillside neighborhood of Montclair, California, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price faced a church overflowing with people, many of whom blamed her for the crime in their neighborhoods due to her advocacy for restorative youth justice. She said, “I am the person who is not supposed to be here.”

Price was talking about her childhood. She described how she was arrested as a teenager, how she spent time in foster care, and how the criminal legal system might have been her future if things had gone slightly different.

Price — battling a recall attempt that kicked off just months after she took office as Oakland’s first Black female DA — had shown up to the town hall that night to defend her vision for the office, which included an unwavering refusal to over-criminalize young people. She ran on a 10-point plan to reform criminal justice towards restorative youth justice. And since taking office, she has instituted policies to keep 16- and 17-year olds in the youth justice system instead of transferring them to adult prisons, and reevaluated how the county treats young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. These issues of restorative youth justice, Price said, were what had inspired her to run for DA in the first place. She told the crowd, “When I looked at our racial disparities for our young people in Alameda County, I could not look away.”

Price was making this appeal in enemy territory. Montclair, whose location abutting a freeway may have made it a target for theft, had not voted for her. Neither had the rest of the Oakland Hills, where handsome Craftsman homes and tree-lined streets perch high above the much poorer city with which they share a chief prosecutor. And so after the DA spoke about racial disparities in youth justice — 87% of children in the county’s juvenile system are Black or Latino — and emphasized her belief in restorative youth justice, a member of the neighborhood association that hosted the event took the mic and asked about “one of the elephants in the room”: a series of recent robberies allegedly committed by teenagers. Rumors had been going around that Price’s office had let the young people go without so much as a charge.

The issue of youth crime and restorative youth justice has become a flashpoint in Oakland politics. Local news stories of retail theft, robberies, and a small number of serious crimes have captured public attention. People grimace over the news that more than half of Oakland’s students are chronically absent from school, double the national average. This spring, The Berkeley Scanner, a local paper that has been relentlessly critical of Price, broke the news that the DA had decided to keep in the juvenile system a young man who was 17 when he opened fire at a birthday party, killing teenage brothers Angel and Jazy Soleto. This outraged members of the Soleto family, who later held a press conference supporting the recall.

Read the full article about restorative youth justice by Piper French at The Imprint.